The people’s Pope

There were no big crowds in St. Peter’s Square on the second day of the Vatican conclave to elect a new pope. The evening of March 13, 2013 – a Wednesday – was wet and miserable, and everyone knew the secret polling among the 115 cardinal electors could take a few days, weeks even.

Then a surprise. At 7:07 p.m., a plume of white smoke arose from the Sistine Chapel, signalling the cardinals had anointed their man. A little more than an hour later, his identity was revealed: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then 76, an Argentine Jesuit from Buenos Aires who had been considered a long-shot candidate. Out he walked onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, overlooking the vast square that had suddenly filled with Christians, curious tourists and armies of reporters, nuns and priests.

The first non-European pontiff in about 1,300 years, he emerged in a simple white cassock. He had forsaken the pompous velvet, silk and fur-trimmed robes and red shoes that had been made by Gammarelli, ecclesiastical tailors since 1789, ahead of the conclave. And his first words were not the customary “Praised be Jesus Christ” or “Dear brothers and sisters.”

“Buona sera” – good evening – he said in Italian with a hint of a Spanish accent. The audience was immediately charmed, and, as if by a miracle, the rain stopped.

The message was clear from the onset. Pope Francis was a street priest at heart – and by training in the rough streets of Buenos Aires.

He would lead a frugal and simple existence. He would not even live in the opulent Apostolic Palace, choosing instead Vatican City’s modest Casa Santa Marta guesthouse, where he would occupy Suite 201.

He would be chauffeured around in a cheap Fiat, not a luxurious Mercedes-Benz with blacked-out windows. He would not use Castel Gandolfo, the traditional papal summer residence overlooking Lake Albano in the cool, breezy hills just beyond Rome.

He would, as he would say three days after his election, want a “poor church for the poor.” He had chosen the pontifical name Francis, after Francis of Assisi, because the 13th-century friar represented “poverty and peace.” The plight of the poor, migrants and the unemployed would become the leitmotif of his messages.

Pope Francis died Monday at 7:35 a.m., according to the Vatican, at the age of 88 after a 12-year reign. He had been in poor health in recent years, largely using a wheelchair and prone to respiratory, intestinal and heart ailments. Since 2021, he had been in hospital in Rome at least four times, twice for abdominal surgery.

From Feb. 14 until March 23, he was in Rome’s Agostino Gemelli University Policlinic hospital, gravely ill from double pneumonia. He almost died then, his doctors said. When he was released, there was ample speculation that he was being sent home to die, though he rallied at points, hosting official visits from King Charles III and, only a day before his death, U.S. Vice-President JD Vance.

By the standards of his predecessors – Benedict and John Paul – Francis’s unadorned, down-to-earth style was revolutionary, all the more so after the somewhat aloof style of Benedict. But it was also something of a feint: Schooled in Argentina’s peculiar Peronist socialism, Francis hid a tough, secular side, making him in the eyes of millions of Catholics and non-Catholics a formidable political figure as much as a religious one.

He quickly mounted an attack on clericalism, specifically challenging the often haughty attitudes of the men and women of the cloth. He wrote that when “clerics feel they are superior, they are far from the people.”

He overhauled the Vatican Bank, which for years had been swamped with allegations of corruption, money laundering and kickbacks. He removed bishops who had not dealt rigorously with the sins of sexual abuse and cardinals he considered disruptive or hostile to his reform agenda, though his critics, including Bishopaccountability.org, said he did not go far enough in removing sexual abusers.

In November, 2023, he essentially went to war with Cardinal Raymond Burke, the retired conservative American prelate who had been highly critical of Francis’s outreach to LGBTQ Catholics. Francis removed the cardinal’s salary and right to a subsidized Vatican apartment.

He made nature and climate change central to his ethos. An equal passion for him was the plight of migrants and refugees, going so far as to install an enormous bronze sculpture of migrants, created by Canadian religious sculptor Timothy Schmalz, in St. Peter’s Square. He attacked the excesses of capitalism and an “economy that kills” because of the gaping wealth divide that was banishing millions, billions even, to the cruel fringes of society. “He was what the whole church needed today,” said Mr. Schmalz, the creator of the Angels Unawares sculpture. “And that was a hardcore Pope who dealt with hardcore issues.”

In an interview, Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Human Integral Development, called Francis “a Catholic world figure like we have never seen before. He has an amazing ability to communicate and respond to the issues of our time. An ‘economy that kills’ is a spectacular quote.”

But he made scant progress in bridging the rift between the far-right and far-left factions of the church. The former considered him too liberal; the latter not liberal enough.

Many in the West considered his stand on the war in Ukraine overly soft on the Russians, and his position on Israel’s destruction of Gaza perhaps not soft enough after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on civilians and soldiers in Israel. He reportedly warned Israeli President Isaac Herzog that it is “forbidden to respond to terror with terror” and called for an investigation into alleged Israeli genocide in the Palestinian enclave.

The plight of the Palestinians was close to his heart. Almost every night before his death, Francis called the Holy Family Catholic parish in Gaza to see how the pastor and the men, women and children he sheltered were doing.

The conservative end of the church accused him of wholesale sellout to the Chinese Communist Party, which was secretly handed the right to choose bishops on the mainland, then have the Vatican approve them. Nor did he specifically register his support for the courageous protest movement of Iranian women that began in the fall of 2022 and continued for months.

And Francis failed to reverse the severe decline of the church in its European heartland and in the Americas. Take Poland, traditionally one of the world’s most Catholic countries and the birthplace of John Paul, the anti-communist Pope (now saint) who played a key role in bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the early 1980s, more than half of Poles attended Catholic mass; by 2021, only 28 per cent did. But the Catholic Church is growing fairly quickly in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Asia-Pacific region, leading to speculation that Francis’s successor will come from one of those areas.

Just before Christmas, 2019, Francis acknowledged the decline and cast blame on the leaden ways of the church. “Today, we are no longer the only ones that produce culture, no longer the first nor the most listened to,” he told prelates. “Here we have to beware of the temptation of assuming a rigid outlook. Rigidity that is born from fear of change and ends up disseminating stakes and obstacles in the ground of the common good, turning it into a minefield of misunderstanding and hatred.”

Canadians and the Indigenous peoples in Canada will remember Francis most for his twin apologies for the residential schools’ tragedies. The apologies were a long time coming, though it was John Paul, who was Pope from 1978 until 2005, who had laid the groundwork for them, even if he did not specifically beg forgiveness from Indigenous peoples, who sought a full-throated, bent-knees apology from the Vatican. They finally got their wish in April, 2022, when they visited the contrite Francis in Rome. Francis realized that he could do better and vowed to visit Canada to make a more extensive apology, and act of reconciliation, on Indigenous soil, where he could see the crime scenes with his own eyes.

On July 24, 2022, he embarked on a remarkable journey, his 37th foreign mission, visiting the First Nations, Métis and Inuit in their homelands in Alberta, Quebec and Nunavut. It would be one of the longest and most ambitious trips of his career, one aimed at healing the anger and pain caused by the Catholic Church’s wicked behaviour during the long residential school era, which did not officially end until 1997. In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared that the schools were “a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so they no longer existed as distinct peoples.”

Not long before the Pope and his entourage left Rome, the probable unmarked graves of Indigenous children were discovered at or near the sites of several residential schools. Murray Sinclair, the TRC chairman, said about 6,000 children possibly went missing from schools.

Some Indigenous people were thrilled and deeply touched that Francis was making a formal apology on Canadian soil. Some did not accept his apology, were underwhelmed by it or felt ambivalent to it. “How do you even apologize for such momentous wrongdoing – how do you even start?” Angela Jackson, an artisan from Canmore, Alta., told The Globe and Mail during the Pope’s visit.

Everywhere, the crowds were not as big as expected. There were thousands of empty seats for his July 26 morning mass at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, where his message fell flat. Oddly, the mass was not tailored to Indigenous cultures or traditions and seemed like one he could have delivered in Rome.

Still, Francis’s Canadian voyage had its successes and, over all, was a striking and historic event. Here was a Pope apologizing on Indigenous soil for the church’s abusive treatment of at least 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children installed in schools supported by the Canadian government since the 1880s.

“In the face of this deplorable evil, the church kneels before God and implores His forgiveness for the sins of her children,” he said in Maskwacis, a First Nations community about 70 kilometres south of Edmonton, on the first day of his visit. “I myself wish to reaffirm this, with shame and unambiguously. I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.”

“The Pope’s visit to Canada was important because he came to listen to Indigenous groups and acknowledge the sins and crimes of the church against them,” Vatican watcher Thomas Reese, an American Jesuit priest who is a senior analyst of Religion News Service, said in an interview with The Globe. “He did this because the Indigenous peoples asked for an apology and because, as Christians, we have an obligation to confess our sins.”

On the flight back from Canada, Francis startled the media by calling the residential school abuses “genocide,” a term the church had not used before. It was a shockingly honest admission from the leader of the world’s biggest Christian institution, one apparently aimed at eliminating any doubt that the church itself as a whole was guilty of grave sins.

“His use of the term ‘genocide’ was important because it acknowledged these were not simply individual sins and crimes but a systematic policy aimed at destroying a people’s identity and culture,” Father Reese said.

With that, Francis partly healed the gaping wound that had been the residential schools, a serial crime for a century and a half. But the wound remains wide open, and bleeding, for many survivors, whose rage against the church and the Canadian government was on full display during the Canadian tour.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was quite unlike any of his predecessors. The time had come for a non-European pope, given the reality that the church has been a waning force in Europe for decades; and he was widely regarded as a theologically liberal priest who could add a dash of populism to his office.

He was born on Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, the son of Italian immigrants. The young Bergoglio at first worked as a chemical technician, a nightclub bouncer and in the food-processing industry. When he was in his early 20s, severe pneumonia led to the removal of part of his right lung (a medical condition that would worry his handlers during the pandemic, when he rarely wore a mask).

Never satisfied with his menial jobs, he felt the call from the church – then a powerful force in Argentina – and, in 1958, became a Jesuit novitiate, the traditional two-year program of learning, work and prayer for new members of the Society of Jesus. He studied humanities in Santiago, Chile, earning the equivalent of a master’s in philosophy, worked as a high-school teacher for a while and was ordained a priest in 1969.

Bergoglio’s – and Argentina’s – dark period came after the 1976 military coup that led to the Dirty War, when the murderous military junta, led by the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, used death squads to hunt down political dissidents, socialists, left-wing Peronists, the Montoneros guerrilla movement and left-wing Jesuits.

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During those terrible years, Bergoglio was head of the Argentine Jesuits. In 1976, two Jesuit priests disappeared. They were found alive, and drugged, in a field five months later. Some of Bergoglio’s detractors accused him of failing to protect the priests – or even betraying them to the regime.

He denied the claims, and a lawsuit accusing him of complicity in the priests’ kidnapping was dismissed. Reviewing three biographies of Pope Francis for The Atlantic magazine in 2015, American political analyst Ross Douthat concluded that “Bergoglio labored tirelessly behind the scenes to save people (not only priests) in danger of joining the ranks of the ‘disappeared.’”

But Mr. Douthat noted that Bergoglio did not attack the Dirty War publicly, for which he paid the price. He was exiled from the Argentine Jesuit leadership and sent to a Jesuit residence in Córdoba, far from Buenos Aires, “and essentially left to rot,” he wrote. The exile lasted two years, after which the new archbishop of Buenos Aires recruited him in 1992 to be one of his auxiliaries.

Some authors who followed Francis insist the future pope underwent a transformation in Córdoba that, in the words of Paul Vallely, writing in Newsweek, “transmuted him from an authoritarian reactionary into a figure of radical humility who today is turning the Vatican upside down.”

According to Mr. Vallely, this transformation saw him spend long hours with the downtrodden in Buenos Aires, where the economy was collapsing – Argentina entered full-blown crisis in 2001, when it defaulted on its debt – making him known as the “Bishop of the Slums.”

He quadrupled the number of priests working in the slums, backed self-help co-operatives and helped form a union among the cartoneros, the poorest of the poor who sort through garbage to find material that can be recycled. His attention to the downtrodden seemed to take him close to the fundamentals of liberation theology, the Christian movement born in Latin America that emphasized the rights of the poor.

At times, he sprinkled his language with the words of liberation theology, criticizing the wealth divide that led to economic oppression as “structures of sin” and declaring that “not to share wealth with the poor is to steal from them.”

In the 1980s, Bergoglio served as a seminary teacher and went to Germany, where he did graduate studies in theology. He was named archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and lived in a cheap apartment instead of the official residence – a pattern he would repeat in Rome. He held that post until he emerged from the church’s global shadows to become pontiff 15 years later.

During his time as archbishop, he was critical of Argentina’s President, Néstor Kirchner, and his successor, his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, on matters such as the regime’s legalization of same-sex marriage, displaying his conservative side and confounding some observers who had labelled him a true liberal.

In reality, Bergoglio did not fit easily into either the left or right camps, at least in the neatly compartmentalized either-or American sense. While he promoted women within the church, he did not ordain them as priests, despite sustained pressure to do so from women’s rights groups. Nor did he approve of gender reassignment or legal abortions, which he condemned as part of the “throwaway culture” that allowed unborn children to be discarded.

On the other hand, he has condemned discrimination against the LGBTQ community and said the church should be more welcoming to Catholics and non-Catholics of any description, calling for a more open, inclusive and compassionate church. Shortly after he became Pope in 2013, he said that even atheists can be redeemed. “Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give you this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each of you is a child of God,” he said early in his papacy.

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If there are themes for which Pope Francis will be most remembered, they are the poor and the environment. The two were intimately related, in his view, since environmental calamities hit the poor hardest. Environmentalism was hardly a new theme at the Vatican – his predecessor, Pope Benedict, called Earth God’s garden, one that had to be taken care of to make it fruitful. It was Francis who elevated the issue to the heavens, inspiring politicians and climate negotiators everywhere.

Francis doubled up on Benedict’s green theme, making it a key focus of his papacy. In 2015, he published his encyclical (a public letter devoted to Catholic teaching) Laudato Si’, Italian for “Praise be to you,” which was inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s religious song Canticle of the Creatures and its gratitude for the natural world. The encyclical was addressed to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, suggesting that the Pope was aiming for – and understood – the church’s evolution into a global force.

It was a powerful, even soaring, piece of writing. It suggested that the environment is composed of intersecting relationships among man, nature and God and that environmental damage hurts the global poor and future generations the most. “Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; I must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” Francis wrote.

Laudato Si’ was released a few months ahead of the breakthrough 2015 Paris climate change conference, which committed countries to agree to limit the rise in global average temperatures to two degrees Celsius and ideally 1.5. A new version of the document was released in the fall of 2023, after a year of record-breaking global average temperatures. “Pope Francis’ contribution to discourse on international climate policies and sustainable development objectives inspired political co-operation leading up to pivotal international agreements,” wrote Irene Burke of Princeton University’s Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination.

Francis’s encyclical was not just a plea for climate action and justice in the philosophical sense; it displayed a sophisticated knowledge of how market-related climate techniques, such as carbon credits, work – or do not.

“The strategy of buying and selling ‘carbon credits’ can lead to a new form of speculation,” he wrote. “Rather it may simply become a plot which permits maintaining excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.” Indeed, such permits have often been criticized by environmentalists and investors as an effective licence to pollute.

Laudato Si’ was as much a social treatise as an environmental one and highlighted Francis’s focus on the wealth divide, the gaping inequalities between the (rich and polluting) global north and the (poor and victim of pollution) global south.

The economic inequality theme would be highlighted in Francis’s third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti – “Brothers All” in Italian – which was published in 2020, during the depths of the pandemic, when religious leaders, politicians, economists, academics, sociologists and everyday workers used the enforced pause in their regular routines to re-examine the role of society and government in building the ideal nation-state. In essence, the encyclical was a blueprint, if a rambling one, for a just society, one that does not fight government but rather works with it.

Parts of Fratelli Tutti are a scathing criticism of dog-eat-dog capitalism of the American variety. Francis pleaded for a more restrained postpandemic world, saying “our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation.” He was critical of neoliberal economics, noting that the marketplace cannot solve every problem and too often resorts “to the magic theories of ‘spillover’ or ‘trickle.’ ”

The encyclical was pragmatic, in a sense, in that he saw government (the nation-state) as the prime tool in caring for the common good, responsible for everything from defending human rights to redistributing wealth. Again, as did his environmental writings, his thinking on capitalism and market forces captured the moment and seemed modern and progressive.

Francis’s likely replacement is not known, but he has had enormous influence over the College of Cardinals, whose electors – those under the age of 80 – choose the new pope in a secret voting session in the Sistine Chapel. As of early 2025, there were 138 cardinal electors, 110 of whom were appointed by Francis. Most of them are non-European, raising the odds that the Vatican will, for the first time, have an Asian or African pope – that is, a leader from the parts of the church that are stable or growing.

At the same time, Francis’s successor may not be radically different, since he has appointed so many of the men in red robes. That means any successor might build on his attacks on unregulated globalization and capitalism, on his compassion for refugees, migrants and the poor and his embrace of the environmental movement. As Father Reese, the analyst at Religion News Services, said, “He has opened windows that will be difficult to close.”

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